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Squeezing Juice from Brownfields

July 3, 2011, 5am PDT

Communities across the country are trying to reuse contaminated brownfields as sites for the production of clean energy.

"Among the successfully completed brown-to-green projects are a wind farm at the former Bethlehem Steel Mill in Lackawanna, New York; a concentrating solar photovoltaic array on the tailings pile of a former molybdenum mine in Questa, New Mexico; solar panels powering the cleanup systems at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Superfund site in northern California; and the U.S. Army's largest solar array atop a former landfill in Fort Carson, Colorado.

'It's an untapped opportunity to not just deliver cleanup to some of these contaminated or previously contaminated sites, but to recycle our industrial legacy in making progress toward a cleaner energy future,' said Chase Huntley, a policy advisor on energy and climate change for the nonprofit Wilderness Society."

Sites like Philadelphia's Navy Yard are being reused to host small-scale solar power plants and other energy producing uses.